Cover art for “Far Futures: Book Four”
My short story “Awash on Titan’s Shores” has been accepted into this anthology. Marketing won’t officially start until October for publication in December.
I haven’t even started editing the story with the publisher yet. All I’ll say is the anthology requires the story be set on or around Saturn’s moon Titan and military SciFi was acceptable.
Here’s a little taste:
PHOTO PROMPT © Ted Strutz
“This is just like before. Look at the image and tell me what you see.”
Ron sat across the table from Dr. Anita Smythe in the mint-green examination room, his blue eyes staring at the photo.
“Bad art.”
“Does it evoke any particular thoughts or emotions?” she asked.
“Only that I’m getting tired of this charade.”
“Ron, it’s not a…”
He slammed his fists on the table and she jumped at the sound.
The door burst open and two armed guards ran in.
“It’s okay,” said Smythe. “Reprogramming someone to be an assassin…”
“…is dangerous work,” Ron completed the sentence.
PHOTO PROMPT © Amanda Forestwood
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Demetrius saw that Charles and Diane had chosen two human-pulled rickshaws rather than self-driving e-shaws. They were meeting with Mr. Phoebe at his estate near Zhuxian Park. This should have been an easy kill, but where were the drivers?
The bounty hunter walked down the street pretending to be a western tourist. There they were. Not just drivers but bodyguards. They were vaping near the service entrance.
He released the brake on the first rickshaw and watched it roll downhill. One driver would be gone for awhile as Dem killed the other and then slipped inside for his real prey.
© James Pyles
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I found out about the SciFi/Mystery novel Pines by Blake Crouch when I was looking up something totally unrelated. I had watched (again) the pilot episode to the 1966 Irwin Allen TV show The Time Tunnel and was wondering why the government would want to invent time travel.
Time travel, contrary to popular fiction, isn’t easily weaponized. If you want to change the past and say prevent anyone else besides the U.S. acquiring nuclear weapons, it would be incredibly complicated. Unforeseen variables could cause all kinds of unanticipated results, assuming you could change your own timeline at all.
It gets complex and it’s not the focus of this review. In one article I read, Blake Crouch said that changing time would most likely not be possible. If you tried to, as in the Back to the Future movies, prevent Marty’s Mom and Dad from meeting in 1955 so they couldn’t get married and ‘make” Marty, time would find another way for them to get together and sustain history.
I became curious about Crouch and looked up his books, finding the Wayward Pines novel series. My local library had a copy of “Pines,” so I checked it out.
PHOTO PROMPT © Rochelle Wisoff-Fields
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The tall man in the sports jacket looked awkward in the fabric shop as he approached the brunette clerk wearing glasses.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for a fabric for my wife. It’s going to be our fifth wedding anniversary and she wants something in amethyst.”
“You mean sapphire.” She paused for a moment. “I have just the thing in back. Come with me.”
She escorted him to a storage area and excused herself. Alone, he then pulled an envelope and a small tape recorder from inside a drawer and turned it on.
The control voice began, “Good morning, Mr. Phelps.”
Cover art for the novel “Progress Report”
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Author Roman Lando contacted me not too long ago and asked if I’d be willing to review his science fiction novel Progress Report. I said I was willing and he sent me a file compatible with my old Kindle Fire.
I was in the middle of another book at the time, but finally got a chance to dig into “Progress” starting a few days ago. In print form, it would be only 239 pages, so not a long read.
In broad strokes, the first and last third of the book is an action, adventure, techno-thriller involving an unlikely hero (patterned very much after the author) who is working with an alien and a covert agent to stop other aliens from starting World War III.
Unfortunately, in the middle third, there was a very long, expositional data dump along with a great deal of pseudo-science and psuedo-philosophy that took most of my interest away. Everything is told from the journal entries of the protagonist “Art” and Art is extremely “wordy.”
Promotional image
I’m very happy that my fellow author Brian – James, otherwise known as “Damaged Skull Writer” reviewed the Terror Tract Publishing horror anthology 7 Deadly Sins.
It features my short story “The Babel Project” (Pride). The review states in part:
Cover art for the novel “Terminum” by Lyla El-Fayomi
Disclosure: This is my first review of an indie SciFi book for Reedsy Discovery. In exchange for a free digital copy of a book, they ask that the writer craft a review of between 300 to 400 words in length and have it published on their site prior to a specific date. Basically, it’s free promotion for the book, Reedsy, and the reviewer.
I chose Lyla El-Fayomi’s Terminum to review because the premise was compelling. An experimental virus stops people from aging but at random points in their lives. However, the darker side is that some of those infected will be abruptly killed by an unknown side effect called Sudden Death Syndrome.
In investigating a cure, scientists Yasmine Holloway and Leo Genix suddenly become fugitives, being hunted down both by law enforcement and bounty hunters. They are thrust into the shadowy realm of a group of covert operatives who have, perhaps for decades, been aware of a conspiracy to hide the truth about the virus and to prevent them from ever delivering a cure.
Cover art for Aidan Reid’s novel “Yage.”
It’s been quite a while since I reviewed Irish indie author Aidan J. Reid’s mystery novel Sigil. The book introduced Father Tom Regan, a Catholic Priest with a nose for mysteries, and particularly the bizarre.
Yage is the second in the “Tom Regan Thriller” series, and this time, Reid takes it up a notch.
Based on his own drug use experiences under somewhat similar circumstances, Reid takes Father Regan to Peru, ostensibly to meet his young niece Louise, who has been hiking throughout the Peruvian region, but also to process his own crisis of faith, particularly in light of the conclusion of the Sigil ordeal.
What Regan finds is a mystery he didn’t ask for and one that puts the life of his niece at risk. Slowly putting the clues together, he finds that Louise is only one of a number of victims of a mysterious shaman, who is somehow tied to the Yage tourist trade, people from western nations who pay local companies to administer and monitor their use of a hallucinogen for a variety of personal purposes. Tom himself must undergo this challenge in his desperate efforts to find his missing niece. Along the way, he finds unlikely allies in the form of a local priest, other tourists, and another young woman he must use, and put at risk, in order to discover what happened to Louise.
© Sue Vincent
Twenty-five year old Eileen Kateb could only hear the sound of her own breathing and her soft footfalls as she slowly made her way between the columns of the Cathedral de Sacre Coeur, which had recently been converted to a library. Her grandparents had quietly immigrated to England during the heyday of French rule over Algeria, so she could have blended in among the millions of Muslim women in the coastal city of Oran who looked just like her. However, she chose to dress as a European instead of clothing herself in a hijab, because, after all, Houari Boumédiène and his thugs knew she was here. That was the point.
“You can stop right there, Miss.” The man stepped out from behind one of the pillars to her left about ten meters ahead. He was average height, medium complexion, dark hair slicked back with Brylcreem, neatly trimmed mustache, pressed tan suit. He looked like an Arabic Peter Sellers. “I’m surprised the Americans didn’t send a male representative.”
“Actually, I’m British, and James Bond was too busy killing SPECTRE agents and seducing women in the Bahamas to accept this assignment, or perhaps you haven’t seen that movie.”
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